What a year 2006 turned out to be, this was probably the most competitive year that I have seen in the last 8 years that I have been covering the web hosting industry. There were several web hosting providers who caught the competition bug in 2006 and things started escalating quickly. At the beginning of the year a Super Size web hosting package included between 3GB – 5GB of space and between 200-300 GB of bandwidth and may also have included 1 free adon domain. Most of these incredibly huge packages may have cost between $7 - $10; the $7 rate was standard for a 2 year commitment usually.
By the end of 2006 the Largest of the packages in the market included a staggering 100 GB of space and up to 1500 BG of bandwidth (* one company now offers unlimited bandwidth transfer). This is nearly a 20 fold increase in space and up to 5 times as much bandwidth. In addition some packages now allow you to host Unlimited Domains and rates have dropped in some cases to an incredible $4/ mo.
To put this into perspective when I started in the web hosting industry in the late 1990s the largest web hosting packages boasted of having 150 megs of space and a whopping 5 GB of Bandwidth. Between the late 1990s and the end of 2004 packages had grown in size for roughly 800 MB of space and 20 GB of bandwidth, roughly a four fold increase in sex years. From January 2005 – January 2006 the amount of space went up another 4 times in just that year and bandwidth skyrocketed to 10 times the previous year’s high.
2006 saw the incredible package increases once again and we can only speculate what will happen in the first few months of 2007. The trend indicates that we may again see some exceptional package sizes and values in the marketplace and it will be interesting to see if most of these companies will continue with the obvious increases to their sizes and limits or if they will search for new ways to show their customers the value added services; like free easy to use spam filters and advanced marketing tools, whatever new offers we may see it is uncountable that we will also see healthy increases in the core storage and transfer areas in the web hosting services business.
Thanks for another great year in 2006! – Charlie White, Regional Editor - N. America |
